Digital Gardens are a somewhat recent (2020) idea, based on older principles. Between a blog and a personal notebook, digital gardens are digital spaces where you can collect and connect your thoughts.
Digital Gardens are more public than a notebook, but also more intimate than a regular blog. They will have notes of varying degrees of refinement and will probably never be finished.
In a nutshell, they are great for curious minds that are constantly investigating new topics, and often clustering them in familiar themes. These themes will likely evolve and emerge naturally, even if you did not consciously planned for them.
A few notions that support the whole concept (this list will grow as I get more used with this):
- Writing is thinking
- Thoughts connect to each other bi-directionally
- A Garden is something you tend to but evolves following its own patterns
In the world of terminally online people, there are a few digital gardens that are often used as an example of what it could be:
It is worth pointing out that each of the previous examples uses a slightly different technology backend. For each of the previous examples, the authors have some sort of how-to guides.
- How Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s used TiddlyWiki to create her Digital Garden
- How Tom Critchlow set up his wiki using a variation of Anne-Laure’s process
- Some tips from Maggie Appleton on how non-technical people can create their own Digital Gardens
I’m not a technical person, so I need to work with simple tools. WordPress is not necessarily ideal, but it can be used. As for now, my main focus is to start my own garden and not to learn a few new tools, that risk taking me off track. So I’m using wordpress as my first Digital Garden.
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